The Gall of Bitterness

Once again, someone has informed me that I am bitter and attempting to “pick a fight.” It’s true that I was angry for a time when I first admitted to myself that my belief in Mormonism was sadly misplaced. But those feelings have long since passed.

Sometimes I wonder where this accusation of bitterness comes from, and I usually reach the same conclusion: it arises from the insecurity of knowing that one’s beliefs are not always on solid ground. Otherwise, if you believe that you have good reasons for your belief, you can shake off just about anything.

But with Mormonism, you are forced to do a ridiculous amount of rationalizing. Among other things, you have to explain why

• Joseph Smith’s sleeping with other women, including married women, without the consent of his lawful wife was not only justified but commanded of God.
• The Book of Mormon describes a people and culture who left no trace of themselves and at the same time the book contains a multitude of anachronisms and nineteenth-century textual dependencies.
• The Book of Abraham borrows from sources such as Thomas Dick and Josephus (both of which Joseph Smith had been studying) and yet in its explicit translations of the facsimiles bears no relation to the actual Egyptian text.

The list could go on, but these suffice. People who are sure of the facts don’t need to get defensive or accuse other people of being bitter. They simply deal with the facts. That some of my readers cannot do so speaks more of them than it does of me.

Some Interesting Numbers

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has released some data from a recent survey of Mormons. Most of the numbers show what we would expect: Mormons in America tend to be conservative and white and have large families. But some of the information is pretty telling.

Anecdotally, many of noticed that the LDS church has not been attracting converts from among the educated and stable. The survey seems tobear this out, showing that converts are more likely to be uneducated (16% of converts did not graduate from college, as opposed to just 6% of lifelong members) and economically disadvantaged (40% earn less than $30,000 a year, compared to just 21% of lifelong members). However, the convert population is considerably older than the lifelong members (48% are over 50, whereas only 30% of lifelong members are), which signals to me that the church is not attracting younger people, which is a pretty bad sign for a missionary church.

I was also surprised that only 57% of Mormons say they believe their church is the “one true church,” which of course is one of the central tenets of Mormonism. Far more believe in the Bible (91%) though more than half don’t take it literally (57%). It’s too bad that they didn’t ask if Mormons take the Book of Mormon literally. That would have been interesting.

A large majority (76%) of self-identified Mormons say they attend church at least once a week. This is interesting because most LDS wards would kill for an activity rate that high. Most wards I have been in have activity rates around 40-60%, and I don’t think that’s out of the ordinary. The high stated rate indicates to me that a lot of “less active” Mormons that the church still counts on its rolls do not consider themselves Mormons in any meaningful way.

Anyway, lots to chew on in the survey.

Can the LDS canon be revised?

Obviously, the LDS church teaches that the canon is open to new revelation, but what about currently canonized scripture? Can it be revised, rewritten, or emended?

Joseph Smith seems to have had a more fluid intepretation of the written canon than most believers in the Bible, for example. Far from being an inerrantist, Joseph seems to have believed that the text could and should be revised to meet changing needs.

Joseph revised revelation and even ancient scripture as needed. For example, he made significant revisions to the revelations originally printed in the 1833 Book of Commandments for what would become the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants (see Melvin J. Peterson, “Preparing Early Revelations for Publication,” Ensign, Feb. 1985, 14). Similarly, in the process of reviewing and correcting the 1837 edition of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith made intentional changes to the text as “clarifications or amplifications of the meaning of the text. The Prophet Joseph Smith, of course had a perfect right to clarify to anything that he felt needed improvement” (see Stan Larson, “Changes to the Book of Mormon“). This notion of “improving” scripture helps explain the project of revising the Bible for a latter-day church.

These examples suggest that Joseph Smith viewed canonized scripture less rigidly than perhaps modern church members do. Robert Matthews argues that “too often we make the faulty assumption that the established scriptures are the ultimate source of doctrine, rather than revelation. This was the basic argument Jesus had with the Jews in John 5:39, wherein Jesus told the Jewish rulers that they had placed their confidence in the written scriptures instead of listening to him. For both Jesus and Joseph Smith, the Bible was a teaching tool rather than the basic source of their information” (Ensign, September 1981).

Given this idea that revelation, not scripture, is the “ultimate source of source of doctrine,” is it possible that future prophets could by revelation revise the current canon in response to changing needs in the church?

Wordsearch

Last night I noticed my youngest doing a “wordsearch” puzzle. I assumed, incorrectly, that it was something from school, but at one point, he said, “Dad, I got all of them except ‘matrimony.’”

 Of course, I immediately wondered why my son was doing something with ‘matrimony’ in it, so I checked it out. The puzzle was labeled “Protect the Family” and had a list of words and phrases, ranging from “ELIMINATEFILTH” to “FAMILYHOMEEVENING” to “DEFENDMARRIAGE.”

I asked him where he got this puzzle, and he said he found it on the coffee table in the living room. It was then that I turned the page over and saw that it had been printed on the back of the Relief Society newsletter for the month.

I don’t know if my son even knows what matrimony means, but it seems really odd to put this kind of thing on a newsletter for grown women. Of course, it’s not really appropriate for kids, either.

What a weird church it is sometimes.

High Stakes

Not long ago, someone told me that I needed to really try hard to overcome my “issues” with the LDS church because “the stakes are so high.”

Back in my believing days, I would have agreed that the stakes were high: my eternal salvation depended on having faith in the gospel I had been taught all my life. Losing my faith was akin to spiritual death in that I would forever be cut off from God’s presence.

When I first left the church, I felt a sort of desperation to find a “true” church I could live with, but when I determined that my situation didn’t allow for such a search, I decided I would just keep going to LDS meetings, though participating minimally and believing even less.

That’s been about all I could do and still feel comfortable with myself. But a couple of weeks ago, I went to a “Bible church” here in Utah County, and I found that I didn’t really feel any more at home with this group, but I did realize that for once I let my guard down and tried to absorb something from the meetings.

It occurred to me that my guard is always up at LDS meetings. I don’t let anything in because I don’t really want to revisit the pain and disappointment of discovering it’s not true. But I’ve thought that, although I won’t ever be a believer in the LDS sense of the word, I can still worship in my own way with the Saints.

I know some people think that doing so would just make me lukewarm, though I suspect that God reserves that term for people who are undecided about their commitments. I am not. I know that I will never believe in Mormonism again. It simply isn’t true. But I wonder if the stakes are really that high.

Can I make a life for myself within the Mormon sphere without embracing it as true? I have no idea. What do you think?

Conversion Narratives

Much has been said about the common “exit” (or “deconversion”) narratives of former Mormons, some apologists seeing similarities among the narrative structures as invalidating the narrative itself, as if the “angry exie” adopts the narrative as a form of personal disguise with which to conceal the “real” reasons for departing the faith. Adopting the narrative, the theory goes, creates instant validity for the narrator and firmly establishes him or her within the community of unbelievers.

In his book Language and Self-Transformation (Cambridge UP, 1993) , Peter Stromberg explains that a conversion is not “something that occurred in the past and is now ‘told about’ in the conversion narrative. Rather, the conversion narrative itself is a central element of the conversion.” He suggests that we “abandon the search for the reality beyond the convert’s speech and … look instead at the speech itself, for it is through language that the conversion is now re-lived as the convert tells his tale” (3). Stromberg describes common Evangelical Christian conversion narratives as describing “the dual effect of the conversion, the strengthening of [converts'] faith and the transformation of their lives” (3). But it is the adoption of the symbolism of Christian conversion narratives that is itself transformative. He explains that “symbol use within a particular tradition can give the actor a sense of self-transformation” in much the same way that “self-understanding is constructed within the larger society” through language (4). And, he tells us, “the central task of the believer … is, through his or her interpretation of Scripture, to find a meaningful link between the symbol system (the Bible) and his or her experience” (6).

Thus the conversion narrative adopts the symbols and language of system (here the Bible) in order to contextualize the experience and bring the believer into the community of fellow believers. He goes on to describe “ritual” as consisting of “two sorts of messages”: The “indexical” concerns the “present state of the participants,” whereas the “canonical” concerns “enduring aspects of nature, society, or cosmos, … encoded in apparently invariant aspects of liturgical orders.” Ritual (in this case the conversion narrative) is the attempt to bridge the two levels and place the here and now within the context of the enduring: “Ritual is always a point where God and humanity come into contact” (11).

Most of us have heard Mormon conversion narratives throughout our lives, and many of us have given our own versions of the same. Unlike Evangelical conversion narratives, which Stromberg tells us are rarely shared outside of small groups, Mormons are encouraged as part of their worship to share the personal, the moments in their lives where the present met the transcendent.

Perhaps the most well-known conversion story among Latter-day Saints is that of the boy-prophet Joseph Smith, which is canonized in the Pearl of Great Price. Joseph describes himself as a seeker of truth “in the midst of [a religious] war of words and tumult of opinions” (Joseph Smith–History 1:10). Accordingly, he first reflects seriously on the subject of religion, his “feelings … and often poignant” (1:8).

Having then decided to acquaint himself with the various sects, he finds himself completely at a loss to determine which was true: “I often said to myself, What is to be done? Who of all these parties are right; or are they all wrong together? If any one of them be right, which is it, and how shall I know it?” (1:10).

In this moment of confusion, Joseph turns to the scriptures, and as we should be familiar with by now, he finds the promise of “wisdom” through prayer in James 1:5 especially powerful: “It seemed to enter with great force into every feeling of my heart. I reflected on it again and again, knowing that if any person needed wisdom from God, I did” (1:12). It is this powerful experience with scripture that leads him to the Sacred Grove, where in his first “attempt to pray vocally,” he has an ecstatic encounter with the divine.

First he is “seized upon by some power” which envelopes him in “thick darkness” and despair (1:15). Just at his lowest point, he is overcome with a vision of the divine. He describes the vision as a “pillar of light” that descended from heaven (1:16-17), and within this light appeared God the Father and Jesus Christ to teach him the truth about religion: “I was answered that I must join none of [the churches], for they were all wrong” (1:19).

This narrative is quite different from traditional Christian narratives, which tend to emphasize the prior, sinful nature of the believer and his or her transformation to a new self, made clean in the blood of Christ. Joseph Smith makes mention of his sins and their subsequent forgiveness in earlier versions of the First Vision narrative, but in the canonized version, the emphasis is on the search for truth and its ultimate reception by divine means. Not surprisingly, it is this narrative of the seeker of truth and wisdom that is most often represented in Mormon conversions. I will take my examples from a web site called, conveniently enough, mormonconverts.com. The converts come from a variety of backgrounds, from Anglicans to atheists, Catholics to Unitarians, but the narratives usually follow the same pattern of seeking and enlightenment that we see in Joseph’s narrative.

Seekers

Most of the narratives describe a search for truth, for something that is missing. And, like Joseph Smith, they seek the truth in various religions.

“There are times in your life, no matter how old you may be, that you feel you are looking for something. Maybe it is keys, that missing sock or for me, it was a search to fill an empty hole inside me.”

“My desire to marry and my growing disillusionment with the Catholic Church put me on a long path of searching. I realized that I never really had a personal relationship with Heavenly Father or Jesus Christ and I searched long and hard where I might find that relationship. That began a long period of spiritual wandering. I worshipped with Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists, and Pentecostals. I visited Hindu Ashrams and practiced Zen Buddhism.”

“I spent a lot of years looking for a religion. I was raised without one, my mother is an Atheist, and I always felt incomplete when it came to religion. I believed in God, but that was about all I knew. “

“When I visited all those churches over the years, nothing ever felt right to me. I always felt that there was something missing. I’d go to a church, and just feel…empty and lost. Nothing ever touched my soul.”

“I made the choice to try to find God. I know some people have said in my life that it isn’t hard, you would be surprised. Growing up most of my family and my family’s friends were involved in many different genres of Christian churches. None of it made any sense to me.”

“But there has always been something missing, no matter how I have tried and no matter how I dug I could never really find what I was looking for.”

Scriptures

When the religions leave them confused, many turn to the scriptures:

“I needed God. I knew He was the only one I could trust and the only One who could help. I picked up the scriptures and read the first 4 books of the New Testament.”

“Many years passed when … I would read my scriptures in hopes to hopefully pin point the perfect verse that would sum it all for me.”

“On September 12, 1999 I made the decision to turn my life over to Jesus Christ, and trust in Him. This was the result of being given a free miniature Gideon Bible. Having spent every spare minute reading it, and finding a new sense of happiness in what I found there, I began to believe in the Savior. But just how does a person turn their life over to the Lord?, I wondered, and I prayed to know.”

Prayer

Having decided that the scriptures alone are not sufficient to “fill the holes” in their lives, they turn to prayer in hopes that God will impart wisdom to them.

“For the first time in many years I prayed on my knees and I knew in the deepest depths of my soul that Heavenly Father and his son Jesus Christ knew me and loved me. I found my direction home.”

“With tears streaming down my cheeks I knelt by my bed and prayed for probably the first time in my life. Truly prayed to Father in Heaven to show me what He wanted me to do.”

“The first time I got on my knees and spoke to our Heavenly Father I was afraid, but I felt something I had never felt before, that he could hear me and he knew me!”

“My prayers were desperate pleas for something more from my life. …I had no idea how to ask for what I needed, or where to find it. I was dissatisfied, and trapped. I often cried about it, and begged with God for the answer to my problem.”

Opposition

As with Joseph Smith in the grove, some report opposition from Satan preventing them from acting on their desires to believe.

“When I finished my [baptismal] interview I had an overwhelming feeling come over that could only be caused by one thing, and it wasn’t God. The feeling that I should not do this and that I would be criticized and all the awful doubts that could possible come up did.”

“It hit me. Whoa. They want me to do what. And in the back of my mind my dad’s words echoed again, ‘It’s of the devil.’”

“I was outside the church and I felt that there was a barrier preventing me from going in. The girl I was hoping to date was already inside teaching a Primary class at Sunday School. A friendly policeman (well, he was in civvies at the time) and his fiancée, saw my predicament and asked me what the problem was. Apparently, the barrier I was encountering was Satan’s way of using an earlier innate shyness.”

A vision of light

The narratives usually conclude with an ecstatic, spiritual experience, often mirroring Joseph’s description of light and truth descending.

“[During a showing of a film depicting the First Vision]Then it happened, as Joseph was kneeling in the grove and saw the two separate personages who’s glory defied all description, I had felt it! For the first time my heart burned, chills ran up my spine and tears rolled down my face. The spirit hit me so strong that I didn’t care if I was the only blubbering fool in a theater of about 100 people. I knew that the church was true and that I had to be baptized.”

“As I read my entire being was filled with LIGHT, and I knew that Joseph Smith had seen Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ.”

“Several times the Spirit gave me that warm feeling. And finally I was woken up one morning. I sat straight up in bed with the words: “The Book of Mormon is true! So stop asking me!” ringing in my head.”

“As [the missionaries] began to explain that we lived with our Heavenly Father before birth, I began to remember my conversations with God as a young child. I vividly remembered living with my Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. I remembered walking with my other brother, Lucifer and begging him to listen to Father and not to be so stubborn. I remembered crying when some of my friends were cast out of Heaven.”

“At that moment, a sheet of light dropped down from the doorway, obscuring the two young [missionaries] from her view.”

Do these common narrative structures mean that the conversions themselves are not valid? Not in the least, but they do suggest that as humans we ritualize our experience to weld it to the eternal, as Stromberg argues. It is interesting that Mormon conversion narratives follow such a different structure than traditional Christian and Evangelical conversions. This suggests to me that the conversions are seen in terms of cultural and religious expectation, so the narrative is structured to satisfy the needs of the larger community.

On the Sacred and the Profane

A lot of believing Mormons are understandably upset about HBO’s decision to recreate part of the LDS temple ceremony, commonly called the “endowment” by Mormons. For those who don’t know what it is, the endowment is a sacred ceremony performed only within Mormon temples. Joseph Smith, the church’s founder, became a Master Mason on March 16, 1842 and then on May 4 of the same year introduced the new endowment ceremony in an upper room of his store in Nauvoo, Illinois.

The endowment incorporated much of the symbolism of the Masons, including signs, tokens, key words, and penalties, but modified them to fit within a story of the creation, fall, and redemption of humans. The ceremony has changed significantly over the years (most recently in 1990 with the removal of the penalties and other elements, such as the long section involving a “sectarian minister”).

Growing up in the church, I went to the Los Angeles temple once or twic e a year to do proxy baptisms for the dead. I knew that, once you were of a certain age, you went to the temple to perform sacred ordinances, the most sacred being the sealing of husband and wife (and children) as an eternal family.

But the endowment was a mystery to me. Unlike most Mormon kids, I didn’t know about temple garments, mostly because my father, although he had been to the temple, never wore them. My mother wore hers, but I never saw her in just her garments. My oldest sister told me recently that she had seen my mom exactly twice in her garments.

So the endowment was a mystery to me. When I was 12, I got a job working at a gas station a few blocks west of the Los Angeles temple, and I remember talking to a young woman who had a BYU sticker on her car. She mentioned she had been at the temple, and I asked her what she had done there. She looked a little flustered and said, “Um, temple work.” I had no idea what she meant.

At 18 I finally went to the temple for the first time. My grandfather met me at the Provo temple, and I went through what at the time was a bewildering and sometimes troubling three-hour (or so) experience. With time I got used to the ceremony, and only occasionally would I feel like I was engaged in something absurd. I went through the endowment (again as proxy for a dead person) hundreds of times over the next 22 years, and I pretty much had the ceremony memorized.

When I left the church, my bishop told me that the best way to regain my testimony would be to attend the temple, along with the usual “pray and read the Book of Mormon.”  It didn’t work, obviously, and when I attended the temple no longer wanting it to be true, it was hard to force it into something spiritually uplifting. It was what it was, and it left me feeling rather cold. So I never went again.

So, what to make of the furor over Big Love’s recreation of at least parts of the endowment? If this had happened when I was still a believer, I would have been mightily pissed off. For believing Mormons, discussing specific temple content outside the temple (even among believers) is to profane that which is sacred. As one believer commented, it’s the context of the ceremony that makes it sacred, and you can’t understand the context without the presence of the Holy Ghost. So, for HBO to detach the endowment from its physical and spiritual context is blasphemy in the extreme.

I suspect that the presentation of the endowment in the show is an intentional middle finger to Mormons, probably payback for Proposition 8, though I could be wrong. So I sympathize with Mormons who feel violated, and I understand completely why they feel that way. But on the other hand, the endowment is no longer sacred to me, and it doesn’t bother me much that someone else is interested in it enough to put it on TV.

Some ex-Mormons I know are rejoicing at the opportunity to make the church look bad–and seriously, who is going to watch the endowment and say to themselves, I want to be part of that? Some people obviously delight in profaning what other people find sacred. And in all honesty, I’ve been guilty of that in the past.

But at this stage in my life, I’m not interested in seeing the depiction (I don’t subscribe to HBO), so I probably won’t see it. But I wonder what the reaction from the public will be. Even if they do a completely faithful rendering of the ceremony, most non-Mormons will find it bizarre and maybe a little creepy (but then most Mormons feel that way the first time they go, hence my bishop’s and stake president’s counsel not to worry if the ceremony upset me when I went the first time).

But the genie’s been out of the bottle a long time. On the Internet there are audio recordings and transcripts of the ceremony, photos of the temple robes, and illustrations of the signs and tokens. I suspect that, after viewing Big Love, more than a few people will become curious and hit Google right after the show ends.

For me, though, revisiting the endowment is like watching “classic” sports games on TV. I was on pins and needles in 1988 when Kirk Gibson hit his walk-off home run in game one of the World Series. Twenty years later, the moment has lost some of its luster. It just doesn’t mean much to me anymore.

That’s how I feel about the endowment. It took me years to make myself comfortable with the ceremony, and even longer to find something uplifting and spiritual in it. But now it’s just part of the past, devoid of meaning. And once something has lost its meaning, it’s no longer sacred or profane.

Roses

Today was the first Saturday in a long time when the weather was nice enough to work outside, and it was nice not to be sick.

We moved into this house about a month ago, and the one thing that has been bugging me is the strip of overgrown rose bushes along the driveway. They had to have been at least 9 feet tall, and they were all twisted and snarled, with smaller shoots woven into the larger, mostly dead ones.

Not only were the rose bushes ugly (it’s winter, after all), but you could not get in and out of the car without snagging your clothes on a thorn.

So, armed with a new pair of hand clippers and leather gloves, I started on the bush closest to the house. Before I started, I read up on rose pruning (thanks, Google), so I knew that you had to cut just above a new bud on each branch.

It was slow going, and even with the gloves, my wrists and forearms were soon scratched and poked. The first bush took almost 45 minutes to prune. There were so many small shoots that were tightly wrapped around the larger branches and each other, but I wanted to get it right. So I looked carefully for new buds, the small red bumps standing out from the green stems. But for a lot of time, I just cut at will on the dead brown branches, the dried leaves and shriveled orange-brown rose hips drooping sadly toward the ground.

A neighbor had told me he makes rose hip jelly, but I thought these were way too far gone. As I was finishing up the first bush, an elderly woman walked by, pulling a wagon with two small boys. She stood in the driveway for a good 15 minutes telling me about her daughter, who had herniated a disk in her spine, which explained why she was caring for the two boys.

“It’s going to take a couple of days for you to get these bushes cut,” she said, and at that point I thought she was probably right. But when she left, I started back in on the roses. A few of the branches on the driveway side had little tufts of polyester batting and small shards of fabric, evidence of kids who hadn’t made a clean exit from the car.

Three hours later, I was done, and my green-waste can was filled to overflowing. The roses now stand a more-or-less uniform 18 inches or so, and they no longer look like the final scene of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (parents like me will know what I’m talking about).

I was pretty pleased with myself, and when my sister called from California, she said I sounded happier than the last time we had spoken. She brought up religion, and she said that I seem to have gotten to a good place regarding Mormonism. “It’s OK to be angry or hurt about the church when those feelings are warranted,” she said, “but you don’t want to be angry and hurt all the time. It doesn’t sound like you are anymore.”

No, I’m really not. A friend sent me a rather scathing letter the other day about my religious beliefs, and I think I would have reacted rather badly had I received that letter a couple of years ago. As it was, I just politely responded that I did not wish to discuss religious issues with that friend anymore.

Imagine that: just saying and thinking, “I don’t want to talk about that anymore.” Maybe the thorns in my life, many of them of my own making, are clearing away. It will take more than an afternoon, and definitely more than a pair of hand clippers, but I can see the roses amid the thorns. That’s a good start.

The Double-Whammy

I’ve been mulling over these ideas for a number of years and have finally written them down. What do you think?

Several years ago I attended the dedication of the Mount Timpanogos Temple. Being at that time the executive secretary in our ward, I got tickets to sit in the celestial room during that session of the dedication. My wife and I ended up sitting in the third row, maybe six feet away from the podium at which stood the prophet, Gordon B. Hinckley. I will never forget what he said as he rose to speak to all of us. “Your being here at this temple tells me that you are the best people in the world.” He paused and added, “If you were honest in your recommend interviews.”

That statement encapsulates to me one way the church manages to keep its members committed and dedicated. Like a fish hook embedded in the mouth of a cutthroat trout, the church uses two seemingly contradictory premises to keep its members on the line:

1. You are better than “the world.”

2. You are not good enough.

Let’s look at these two beliefs. We’ve all heard people bear their testimonies of how much the church has blessed their lives and made them happier and more successful than they otherwise would have been. “I can’t imagine what my life would be if I didn’t have the church,” they say. And they describe those outside of the church as benighted and unhappy. Here’s Glenn Pace: “Compare the blessings of living the Word of Wisdom to those available to you if you choose to party with those in the great and spacious building. Compare the joy of intelligent humor and wit to drunken, silly, crude, loud laughter. Compare our faithful young women who still have a blush in their cheeks with those who, having long lost their blush, try to persuade you to join them in their loss. Compare lifting people up to putting people down. Compare the ability to receive personal revelation and direction in your life to being tossed to and fro with every wind of doctrine. Compare holding the priesthood of God with anything you see going on in that great and spacious building” (Ensign, Nov 1987).

No, we were better than that. We had the truth, and the truth made us free and happy and safe. Gordon B. Hinckley said in 1996, “The greatest safety you have in your lives, my dear young friends, is your membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Cling to the Church and live its principles and I do not hesitate to promise you that your lives will be happy, that your accomplishments will be significant, and that you will have reason to get on your knees and thank the Lord for all He has done for you in giving to you the marvelous and wonderful opportunities that you have” (youth fireside, Vista, California, 23 Mar. 1996).

With such promises behind us, we were told, we could not help to be “a peculiar people,” a shining example to the world of the blessings God had given us. Donald Staheli of the Seventy said, “As you dare to be different, your exemplary conduct will not go unnoticed. Although you will be tried and tested, your faithful adherence to the Lord’s standards will be seen as a beacon in the night to those around you. Have the courage to be different when it is required of you to be true to the standards of the Church. You will be respected for it. And if occasionally you are not respected, you need not worry, because that is not the kind of association you will want or need in your future” (Ensign, Feb. 2009).

So we lived our lives desperately trying to live up to the standards set forth, to truly be examples of the believers so that we could help other people find the happiness we had. And that happiness depended on our church membership. In short, we needed the church to be happy, to be better than the world.

With this belief that we had the truth and that the truth made us happy, we felt a keen need to share our happiness with others. We knew, after all, that those outside our faith could not possibly find the same joy and happiness that we had found in the gospel.

As L. Tom Perry put it, “We are blessed with a great and noble heritage that offers a pathway to truth that veers dramatically from the so-called ways of the world. We need to remind ourselves about the value of our heritage so we do not underestimate its worth. I challenge the many Saints who are hiding in the corners to stand tall and proclaim loudly the treasured teachings of our common heritage, not with a spirit of pride or boasting but with a spirit of confidence and conviction” (Ensign, May 2001).

And we were confident, most of the time. We gladly served missions, invited our friends to church meetings, and looked for “missionary opportunities” in our everday lives. As President Hinckley put it, we conformed, and we thought we found happiness in that conformity. In short, we knew we needed the church to make us happy, to turn us into the “best people in the world.”

But something nagged at us. We knew we had the truth, the gospel that could bring us true joy, but we never quite felt good enough. Even at our most successful moments in life, we always felt like we should have done even more. We felt this way because, coupled with the idea that church membership brings happiness above and beyond what the world can give was the teaching that we could always do better.

Most of us, I would imagine, have been subjected to withering criticism from our church leaders for poor statistical performance or other perceived failures. I’ve written about the excitement I felt at learning that we would be hearing from a General Authority when I was on my mission, the only time during those two years that I would be in the presence of one of the Lord’s representatives. The man who spoke to us literally yelled at us for almost an hour, berating our poor performance, lack of commitment, and general laziness. My companion and I were crushed, but later we convinced ourselves that he was right: it didn’t matter how hard we were working; it wasn’t enough.

And so it is beyond missionary work. Since the days of President Kimball’s call to “lengthen your stride,” we have been told that we need to be better, to do better. The Lord is not satisfied with subpar numbers, and neither should we. Back in 1998, Russell Ballard held up President Hinckley as a model of hard work and dedication: “President Hinckley is doing all that he can do to accelerate the work. He is traveling the world to an unprecedented degree to strengthen and edify the Saints and to urge them upward and onward. … Our President is dynamically out in front, showing the way. The question we must all ask ourselves is, ‘Are we keeping pace with him?’ Each one of us must be prepared to answer that question. I can assure you that it is a subject of considerable discussion among the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. I hope the same is true of every council in every ward and stake in the Church. This is not the time to relax or to coast in our callings. Every council of the Church should be working together on ways to be more effective in preparing our members to be worthy to enjoy all the blessings of the Church and especially the blessings of the temple” (Ensign, Nov 1998).

Of course we all knew that our meager efforts could not compare to those of the prophet; we knew we did not measure up. So we felt guilty and inadequate.

Guilt in LDS terms is almost always spoken of as a positive, motivating emotion that will help us to repent and improve ourselves. In 1983, the Ensign published some guidelines for church members in choosing a mental-health counselor or therapist. One item stands out: “Does he or she feel that appropriate guilt or sorrow for wrongdoing can help someone make positive changes? (A therapist who feels that guilt itself is the problem may focus inappropriately on changing your feelings rather than on helping you change the behavior that causes the guilty feelings.)” (Ensign, Jan 1983). Notice that the idea that “guilt itself is the problem” is rejected out of hand in favor of “therapy” that focuses on repentance. With the idea of “appropriate guilt” in mind, we begin to understand the idea of guilt as a tool in getting church members to lengthen their strides.

It’s not surprising, then, that in Mormonism, repentance isn’t just a turning away from sins as in some other religions, it’s a painful, soul-wrenching experience. Russell Ballard put it this way: “Sin will always, always, result in suffering. It may come sooner, or it may come later, but it will come. The scriptures state that you will ’stand with shame and awful guilt before the bar of God’ (Jacob 6:9) and that you will experience ‘a lively sense of … guilt, and pain, and anguish.’ (Mosiah 2:38.) A related misconception is that repentance is easy. President Kimball said that ‘one has not begun to repent until he has suffered intensely for his sins. … If a person hasn’t suffered, he hasn’t repented.’ (The Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1982, pp. 88, 99.) You need only talk to a person who has truly repented of serious sin to understand that the momentary pleasure of an immoral act is simply not worth the pain that always follows” (Ensign, Nov 1990). For whatever reason, when we’re dealing with the Jesus of Mormonism, His yoke is not particularly easy, and his burden is quite heavy.

We were so busy in the church, and we had so much “potential” to live up to, and yet we never felt good enough. We felt guilty for not putting everything we had into our callings. We felt responsible for everything from the failure of a ward social to an occasional “impure thought.” We were even counseled to assess our part of the blame even when we were victimized by someone else. Richard Scott said, “At some point in time, however, the Lord may prompt a victim to recognize a degree of responsibility for abuse. Your priesthood leader will help assess your responsibility so that, if needed, it can be addressed. Otherwise the seeds of guilt will remain and sprout into bitter fruit” (Ensign, May 1992).

So here we were with this unsolvable conundrum: how can we not be good enough or happy enough when we have the tools to make us both happier and better people?

The answer to both was simple: we needed the church. We needed the church and its teaching and programs to keep us better and happier than the rest of the world. And we needed the church to make us better and happier than we currently were.

It was a kind of carrot-and-stick approach to life, as if we were strapped into a harness with the carrot of happiness and perfection ahead of us, always out of reach, but with the stick of worldliness behind us, threatening to bruise us and damage us.

In the end, we never got to the happiness, and we were left with the guilt and remorse of our failures. And that, ironically, is what kept us in the church.

The Truth Hurts Sometimes

Someone asked me why it was that the issues that so upset my friend (see the preceding post) did not upset me and do not seem to upset a lot of the apologists.

That’s a difficult question. I really can’t answer for anyone else, but it seems logical that most people would be upset if they learned that the religious leader they had been taught to revere as God’s chosen prophet had done some pretty reprehensible and inexcusable things (say, to pick one example, marrying teenagers and married women behind his wife’s back). Indeed, most people who find out these things before joining Mormonism will never join Mormonism. And many church members live blissfully unaware of such problematic pieces of history for years, and when they do uncover them, they are devastated.

But what of us who knew of these things and defended Joseph Smith and the LDS church anyway? Many church members simply deny that any of it happened, waving it off as an anti-Mormon lie. I know people who insist that Joseph’s marriages were platonic in nature and never consummated, despite all of the evidence, including firsthand testimony of the wives who actually did consummate the marriages. Of course, the simple truth is that most ofthe marriages were not platonic. Their sexual nature thus demanded the total secrecy Joseph maintained, including from his wife. There would be no need for public and private denials had these been the “loose dynastic sealings” the apologists speak of.

But a lot of apologists know very well of these problems (and there are far more problems than the plural marriage issues), but they seem untroubled, no matter the seriousness of the problems. I was one of these. I knew at least fifteen years ago of many of the problems with early Mormonism and its claims. Why didn’t it bother me? I think I went through a few stages of understanding.

First, I went into denial mode. Again, using plural marriage as an example, I rejected the information and dismissed it as exaggeration. The Joseph Smith I knew would never have done such things. There had to be some kind of misunderstanding, or the history was incomplete. And last, this really wasn’t an important issue because I had a testimony.

Next, when the evidence became to me undeniable, I rationalized. Well, he was commanded of God, I told myself. This wasn’t the behavior of a sexual predator but a solemn commandment of God made through an angel (with a drawn sword, no less). If God commanded it, it must have been right, and I was wrong to question it because my mortal understanding could not comprehend such holy things. Again, my testimony trumped all, and I accepted the rightness of the acts because I believed in the prophet.

Finally, that day in August of 2005 I acknowledged what I think I had known all along: there was no misunderstanding, and it wasn’t about doing anything holy. It was just part and parcel of the larger religious and financial enterprise Joseph Smith had built around himself. It’s no coincidence that almost every religion led by a charismatic leader ends up with his or her getting involved sexually with followers. It’s just one of those things that people with absolute power do, and Joseph Smith was no exception.

I’m glad I stopped making excuses because my conscience really did bother me all those years, and I suspect that at least some apologists feel that same nagging feeling that something is wrong. But I’d bet that they rest comfortably in their testimonies, as I once did.